RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE.
Wordsworth took his B.A. degree in January, 1791, and quitted
Cambridge with no fixed intentions as to his future career.
"He did not feel himself," he said long afterwards, "good enough for
the Church; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for
that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and
his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the
law. He had studied military history with great interest, and the
strategy of war; and he always fancied that he had talents for
command; and he at one time thought of a military life; but then he
was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to the West
Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow fever, and he
gave that up." He therefore repaired to London, and lived there for
a time on a small allowance and with no definite aim. His relations
with the great city were of a very slight and external kind. He had
few acquaintances, and spent his time mainly in rambling about the
streets. His descriptions of this phase of his life have little
interest. There is some flatness in an enumeration of the
nationalities observable in a London crowd, concluding thus:--
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese,
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
But Wordsworth's limitations were inseparably connected with his
strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only
served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and
grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the
bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy
such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as
were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of
Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible
to shake off. "And what hath Nature," he plaintively asked,--
And what hath Nature but the blank void sky
And the thronged river toiling to the main?
But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may say, the
poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as
a part of the country. Like his own _Farmer of Tilsbury Vale_--
In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he,
Like one whose own Country's far over the sea;
And Nature, while through the great city be hies,
Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise.
Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory
none is more exquisite than the _Reverie of Poor Susan_:
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart
with one of those sudden "revulsions into the natural" which
philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and
hest known of all these poems is the _Sonnet on Westminster Bridge_,
"Earth hath not anything to show more fair;" in which nature has
reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men;
and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great City--as
Sterling imagined it on his dying-bed--"not as full of noise and
dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand and everlasting."
And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was
welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of
regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of
listeners in his _Power of Music_:
Now, Coaches and Chariots! Roar on like a stream!
Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!
He never made the attempt,--vulgarized by so many a "fashionable
novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet,--to disentangle
from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness; to enter
that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the scarcely
noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own; to trace the
passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid vista toward a
sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares by summer
moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers.
But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmodified and
indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to mingle in
a fiercer tumult,--to be caught in the tides of a more violent and
feverish life. In November 1791 he landed in France, meaning to pass
the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to this date the French
Revolution had impressed him in a rather unusual manner,--namely, as
being a matter of course. The explanation of this view is a somewhat
singular one. Wordsworth's was an old family, and his connexions
were some of them wealthy and well placed in the world; but the
chances of his education had been such, that he could scarcely
realize to himself any other than a democratic type of society.
Scarcely once, he tells us, in his school days had he seen boy or
man who claimed respect on the score of wealth and blood; and the
manly atmosphere of Cambridge preserved even in her lowest days a
society
Where all stood thus far
Upon equal ground; that we were brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen;
while the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian peasant
life had confirmed his high opinion of the essential worth of man.
The upheaval of the French people, therefore, and the downfall of
privilege, seemed to him no portent for good or evil, but rather the
tardy return of a society to its stable equilibrium. He passed
through revolutionized Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but
with little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and then
to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. At Orleans he
became intimately acquainted with the nobly-born but republican
general Beaupuis, an inspiring example of all in the Revolution that
was self-devoted and chivalrous and had compassion on the wretched
poor. In conversation with him Wordsworth learnt with what new force
the well-worn adages of the moralist fall from the lips of one who
is called upon to put them at once in action, and to stake life
itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. The poet's heart
burned within him as he listened. He could not indeed help mourning
sometimes at the sight of a dismantled chapel, or peopling in
imagination the forest-glades in which they sat with the chivalry of
a bygone day. But he became increasingly absorbed in his friend's
ardour, and the Revolution--_mulier formosa superne_--seemed to him
big with all the hopes of man.
He returned to Paris in October 1792,--a month after the massacres
of September; and he has described his agitation and dismay at
the sight of such world-wide destinies swayed by the hands of
such men. In a passage which curiously illustrates that reasoned
self-confidence and deliberate boldness which for the most part he
showed only in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, he has
told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward as a
leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his
singleheartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth
and imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of
the multitude might not impossibly rally.
Such a course of action,--which, whatever its other results, would
undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his political
friends in May 1793,--was rendered impossible by a somewhat
undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes "a patriot
of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of twenty-two,
travelling on a small allowance, and running his head into
unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and he reluctantly
returned to England at the close of 1792.
And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English patriots, there came,
on a great scale, that form of sorrow which in private life is one
of the most agonizing of all--when two beloved beings, each of them
erring greatly, become involved in bitter hate. The new-born Republic
flung down to Europe as her battle-gage the head of a king. England,
in an hour of horror that was almost panic, accepted the defiance,
and war was declared between the two countries early in 1793.
"No shock," says Wordsworth,
Given to my moral nature had I known
Down to that very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named
A revolution, save at this one time;
and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth seemed at once
the embodiment and the premonition of England's guilt and woe.
Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the thought of
France. For in France the worst came to the worst; and everything
vanished of liberty except the crimes committed in her name.
Most melancholy at that time, O Friend!
Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable.
Through months, through years, long after the last beat
Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep
To me came rarely charged with natural gifts--
Such ghastly visions had I of despair,
And tyranny, and implements of death;...
And levity in dungeons, where the dust
Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene
Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me
In long orations, which I strove to plead
Before unjust tribunals,--with a voice
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense,
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt
In the last place of refuge--my own soul.
These years of perplexity and disappointment, following on a season
of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial through
which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in France, indeed,
was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive the noblest and
firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For first of all in that
Revolution, Reason had appeared as it were in visible shape, and
hand in hand with Pity and Virtue; then, as the welfare of the
oppressed peasantry began to be lost sight of amid the brawls of the
factions of Paris, all that was attractive and enthusiastic in the
great movement seemed to disappear, but yet Reason might still be
thought to find a closer realization here than among scenes more
serene and fair; and, lastly, Reason set in blood and tyranny and
there was no more hope from France. But those who, like Wordsworth,
had been taught by that great convulsion to disdain the fetters of
sentiment and tradition and to look on Reason as supreme were not
willing to relinquish their belief because violence had conquered
her in one more battle. Rather they clung with the greater tenacity,--
"adhered," in Wordsworth's words,
More firmly to old tenets, and to prove
Their temper, strained them more;
cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradition, and
in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race
severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from
kinship with the struggling past.
Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel now. And his
nature, formed for pervading attachments and steady memories,
suffered grievously from the privation of much which even the
coldest and calmest temper cannot forego without detriment and pain.
For it is not with impunity that men commit themselves to the sole
guidance of either of the two great elements of their being. The
penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are notorious; and every
day affords some instance of a character that has degenerated into a
bundle of impulses, of a will that has become caprice. But the
consequences of making Reason our tyrant instead of our king are
almost equally disastrous. There is so little which Reason,
divested of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to prove
to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take
possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth; he was driven
to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and analysis of all motives,--
Till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction; and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
In this mood all those great generalized conceptions which are the
food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away; and
Wordsworth tells us that at this time
Even the visible universe
Fell under the dominion of a taste
Less spiritual, with microscopic view
Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world.
He looked on the operations of nature "in disconnection dull and
spiritless;" he could no longer apprehend her unity nor feel her
charm. He retained indeed his craving for natural beauty, but in an
uneasy and fastidious mood,--
Giving way
To a comparison of scene with scene,
Bent overmuch on superficial things,
Pampering myself with meagre novelties
Of colour and proportion; to the moods
Of time and season, to the moral power,
The affections, and the spirit of the place,
Insensible.
Such cold fits are common to all religions: they haunt the artist,
the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often they are due
to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed itself
with the impersonal desire; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's case, to
the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too ardently
towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this case, when the
objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and noble, they will
ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fatigues of their
pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how a deepening insight into the
lives of the peasantry around him,--the happiness and virtue of
simple Cumbrian homes,--restored to the poet a serener confidence in
human nature, amid all the shame and downfall of such hopes in France.
And that still profounder loss of delight in Nature herself,--that
viewing of all things "in disconnection dull and spiritless," which,
as it has been well said, is the truest definition of Atheism,
inasmuch as a unity in the universe is the first element in our
conception of God,--this dark pathway also was not without its
outlet into the day. For the God in Nature is not only a God of
Beauty, but a God of Law; his unity can be apprehended in power as
well as in glory; and Wordsworth's mind, "sinking inward upon itself
from thought to thought," found rest for the time in that austere
religion,--Hebrew at once and scientific, common to a Newton and a
Job,--which is fostered by the prolonged contemplation of the mere
Order of the sum of things.
Not in vain
I had been taught to reverence a Power
That is the visible quality and shape
And image of right reason.
Not, indeed, in vain! For he felt now that there is no side of truth,
however remote from human interests, no aspect of the universe,
however awful and impersonal, which may not have power at some
season to guide and support the spirit of man. When Goodness is
obscured, when Beauty wearies, there are some souls which still can
cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law.
Of such stem consolations the poet speaks as having restored him in
his hour of need. But he gratefully acknowledges also another solace
of a gentler kind. It was about this time (1795) that Wordsworth was
blessed with the permanent companionship of his sister, to whom he
was tenderly attached, but whom, since childhood, he had seen only
at long intervals. Miss Wordsworth, after her father's death, had
lived mainly with her maternal grandfather, Mr. Cookson, at Penrith,
occasionally at Halifax with other relations, or at Forncott with
her uncle Dr. Cookson, Canon of Windsor. She was now able to join
her favourite brother: and in this gifted woman Wordsworth found a
gentler and sunnier likeness of himself; he found a love which never
wearied, and a sympathy fervid without blindness, whose suggestions
lay so directly in his mind's natural course that they seemed to
spring from the same individuality, and to form at once a portion of
his inmost being. The opening of this new era of domestic happiness
demands a separate chapter.